In this paper, we study a class of delayed competitive neural networks with discontinuous activations. Without assuming the boundedness and local Lipschizian on the activation functions, some new criteria ensuring the existence and global exponential stability of almost periodic solutions for the neural network model considered in this work are established by constructing some suitable Lyapunov functionals and employing the theory of nonsmooth analysis. Finally, we present some applications and numerical examples with simulations to show the effectiveness of our main results. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.